Third-party virtualization companies appear to be taking advantage of what are traditionally slow news weeks in the technology business by rushing out a host of products designed to make virtualization infrastructures more manageable, cheaper, and easier to squeeze into previously unappreciated corners of the IT world.

ABC: An Introduction to Virtualization

None of these tools are designed to solve all the planning or management issues of enterprise-level virtualization infrastructures, but each is designed to solve a significant and often expensive part of a migration or management problem.

Not all the players are small, of course. Citrix announced yesterday that it has shipped the free version of its XenServer 5.5 that it promised in May. It includes the ability to move virtual machines from one server to another without shutting them down, tools to convert VMware infrastructures to XenServer, support for Active Directory, the ability to add role-based security, support for a range of Linux editions and Oracle 5.3 and the ability to migrate data from VMware's Virtual Machine Disk Format to Citrix and Microsoft's Virtual Hard Disk format.

Planning and Migration for Hyper-V

New Jersey-based startup 5Nine Software has released what it calls the first migration-planning application specifically for Microsoft's Hyper-V hypervisor.

The 5Nine software recommends a virtual infrastructure plans tailored to the cost requirements set by the user; with the tool inventorying the CPU, memory, input/output and storage available and laying out an efficient placement of workloads according to the resources available. It is designed to collect hardware and software performance data without agents, or to import that data from Excel or XML files. There is both a free and a paid version.

In a bit of unfortunate timing for 5Nine, Microsoft this week introduced the beta of the latest version of its free capacity planning tool designed for Hyper-V. The Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Toolkit 4.0 is designed to manage both migrations to Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 RC2. The toolkit takes inventory, makes recommendations on design and assesses both your existing infrastructure and how it might benefit from Hyper-V-based VMs.

VMware ESX

While VMware, CiRBA, Novell and other vendors offer migration and recovery utilities for ESX, a couple of notable additions debuted this week.

Data-replication vendor Double-Take Software, which makes a migration tool for VMware networks, added a recoverability twist with the Virtual Recovery Assistant, which is designed to track all the changes in a given VM, in order to recover it in case of a hardware failure or data loss during migration from a physical server or movement from one VM to another.